Against "killer robots":
"This open letter
was announced July 28 at the opening of the
IJCAI 2015 conference ... Autonomous weapons select and
engage targets without human intervention. They might include,
for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and
eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but
do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones
for which humans make all targeting decisions.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where
the deployment of such systems is - practically if not legally -
feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high:
autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution
in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms. ...
Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and
should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons
beyond meaningful human control. [Signed]
Stuart Russell Berkeley ...
Nils J. Nilsson ...
Stephen Hawking ...
Elon Reeve Musk ..."
-- letter@futureoflife.org [28/7/2015].
(Also see the
bbc [28/7/2015].Terminator
anyone?)

An Australian Government survey found that
"four in ten content consumers (43%), had consumed at least
some illegal files (compared to 21% in the UK). This represents
a quarter of all Australian internet users (26%). ..."
And that
"factors that would encourage people to stop [included]
(38%) legal content more available, and
(36%) content availableas soon as it is released elsewhere"
-- communications.gov.au [22/7/2015].
(And digital rights management 'regions' are archaic and malodourous
-- 5¢'s worth.)

"The US Senate on Tuesday passed a bill to end the bulk collection
of millions of Americans' phone records, ushering in the country's
most significant surveillance reform since 1978 two years after NSA
whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations,"
The Guardian, 2/6/2015,
[more].

Depth First Traversal
of a Graph is a simple algorithm but a useful one.

'A futures trader was arrested in the United Kingdom today on
U.S. wire fraud and commodities fraud and manipulation charges
in connection with his alleged role in the May 2010
"Flash Crash," when the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 600 points
in five minutes ... allegedly employed a "dynamic layering" scheme ...
created the appearance of substantial supply in the market. ...'
-- US Dept. of Justice
[21/4/2015].
Also see the
[bbc].

It is not very often that you find out about a great idea.
That's "find out about", not invent;
inventing one is like being bitten by a hen's tooth.
Coming across clever ideas, at least those of other people,
is relatively frequent but great ideas are much rarer.
A clever idea can be very cunning indeed, and possibly very useful,
but its effects are not so far reaching.
For example, there are many clever ideas
such as the Burrows Wheeler transform
(BWT)
in algorithms.
On the other hand a great idea is one that immediately impresses you
with its scope even if, as is usually the case, you cannot yet see
all of its consequences.
You can quickly tell that it is onto something and is going to be big.
I can recall this happening to me three times in computing:
Church's λ-calculus,
Milner's Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS), and
Wallace and Boulton's Minimum Message Length
(MML)
principle.

India's 'Mars Orbiter Mission' (MOM)
put a satellite into orbit around Mars on 24 Sept. 2014
for a cost of us$74 million.
Monash University's 'New Horizon Centre' building
which opened in 2013 was reported to cost between au$89.9 million
(before construction, e.g., The Age 13 Dec. 2008)
and au$175 million
(2013).
au$1.00=us$0.90± at the time.

Enumeration of connected, vertex-induced subgraphs of a graph
is an interesting little problem with a natural recursive solution
[more].

"... The UK faces a worsening gender gap in its flourishing IT industry,
according to a new study. ... It indicates women account for just
16% of the UK IT workforce. ... [And] despite consistently out-performing boys
in computing A-level results, girls account for just 6.5% of those
taking the exam.
The study was compiled by BCS, the chartered institute for IT, and
E-skills UK. ..." --
[bbc][17/6/2014].

This is an old problem, for example, around 1984 the UK government
made a push to increase the number of students doing computing.
What happened was the number of boys went up but the
number of girls stayed much the same,
so the proportion of girls fell.
The best explanation I have seen was that computing was
perceived, or came to be be perceived, as engineering
(which does beg the question why don't more girls take engineering?).

Sometimes you get tired of banging your head against a brick wall,
such as when you read things like,

Eugene "Kaspersky, head of security firm Kaspersky labs,
revealed at the Canberra Press Club 2013 ... that before the ISS
switched from Windows XP to Linux computers, Russian cosmonauts
managed to carry infected USB storage devices aboard the station
spreading computer viruses to the connected computers. ...
In May, the United Space Alliance, which oversees the running of
the ISS in orbit, migrated all the computer systems related to the
ISS over to Linux for security, stability and reliability reasons."
-- The G. [www][12/11/2013]; see uBend [www][8/11/2013] (@ 17:57+).